Gen is one of the eight trigrams (bagua) of the Yijing. It is composed of a single yang line above two broken yin lines, and its attribute is the Mountain, Keeping Still, associated with stillness, stopping, meditation, and the immovable steadiness of the mountain. In the family symbolism it is the Youngest Son, and its polarity is yang. Its associated element is Earth, and in the Later Heaven arrangement of the bagua its direction is northeast. Each of the eight trigrams combines with another to form the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing. These are the conventions of the Chinese cosmological and divinatory tradition, in which Gen, the mountain at rest, expresses the moment of stopping and the inward stillness that the Book of Changes treats as its own kind of action.
The family member and attribute scheme used throughout the eight trigrams, Gen among them, comes from the Shuogua zhuan, the Explanation of the Trigrams, one of the Ten Wings appended to the Yijing; later tradition credited the text to Confucius, an attribution modern scholarship does not accept, and manuscript evidence places its compilation toward the end of the Warring States period or the start of the Han. In the Earlier Heaven or Fu Xi arrangement, an older and more static ordering than the Later Heaven sequence used for compass direction above, Gen stands in the northwest rather than the northeast; the shift is general across the two schemes, since the Fu Xi ordering pairs each trigram with its direct opposite around the circle, Gen facing Dui in the southeast, a symmetry the King Wen or Later Heaven sequence does not preserve.
Sources Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in ChinaRichard J. Smith with The I Ching, or Book of ChangesRichard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), The Five "Confucian" ClassicsMichael Nylan